I spoke to someone a few months ago, and what I remember most vividly about the conversation was when he said, "once your team starts going home for dinner, you know you're in trouble."
This is an example of a social pathology on two levels. First, it means that working for that one particular company sucks. Second, it is being deployed to make working sucks normative at other companies, too. (And if it gets widely repeated by credulous entrepreneurs, it will infect their lives, their employees lives, etc etc. The viral factor of suck in the social graph has exceeded k = 1.0, watch out!)
It has not been my experience that the narrative this social pathology tells about work being necessarily all-consuming has basis in objective reality. I've done all-consuming work. My business' schedule doesn't resemble that schedule even a little itty-bitty bit.
Patrick, I think you are well aware that much of the difference between your views on this issue and those of the majority of the startup community stems from a fundamental disagreement on the definition of a startup. As you pointed out yesterday (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2382580), we waste too much time on naming things.
So, why don't we simply agree that you are in a different business than the OP's company?
You are a one-man operation who scales by outsourcing; they are a team who scale by hiring through investment ($1M).
You want careful, measured growth; they want superfast growth, whatever the cost.
You are an efficient time manager, who's built "passive" income and chooses to spend a lot of time on HN just for fun; they work crazy hours in the hope of making it really big some day, even if the personal cost today is high.
I'm sure a typical overworked startup could benefit from adopting some of your ways, but it is equally hard for them to see your point as it is for you to see theirs. You haven't been on the other side.
they work crazy hours in the hope of making it really big some day, even if the personal cost today is high.
When you say, "they", you're talking about entrepreneurs who have made a personal choice to make that sacrifice; or, a team of entrepreneurs who have agreed, amongst themselves, to all make that sacrifice together.
I read Patrick's argument as railing against the kind of "entrepreneurs" who are really just free-loading, glorified managers that get angry when anyone on the team starts "slacking" (i.e., working less than 80-100 hours / week) because they're relying on the hard work of other people to bring them their fortune instead of actually doing anything themselves.
I don't think founders are conning employees to exploit them. Employees should be well aware of what they are getting into. There are plenty of well-paying normal jobs available out there.
Patrick is talking about his life as a Japanese salaryman, where 12 (14?) hour workdays are the daily norm at his company, and, if I recall correctly, there are no weekends. He is not talking about Bingo Card Creator.
Your ideas are designed around being able to do business like this, rightly or wrongly others go into over ambitious ideas undermanned and the long hours are probably the only way they are going to pull it off.
This assumes that working more hours actually makes you produce more value, which is highly non-obvious to me. I didn't produce twice as much stuff when I was working twice as many hours. I'm not even sure net output decreased since radically cutting hours. Mythical man month, etc.
Obviously it depends on the nature of the work but I believe the research actually supports this position.
Certainly my experience of coding is that you can do extra hours for a short while and get some benefit but more than a couple of weeks and that starts falling away pretty rapidly.
Even in the short term though it's limited. Beyond midnight (assuming that I've started at 9am-ish and worked relatively solidly) I'm pretty much breaking as much as I'm fixing, plus I tend to be setting myself up for a pretty significant productivity hit the day after.
Interesting. Personally I find the more boring the work the more likely I am to mess it up when tired. At least something tricky gives you some mental stimulation which helps you push through the tiredness and stay focused (or as focused as you can be).
Sure there are those days when you're knackered so you just tidy your inbox, sort out your expenses and so on but most people really don't have that much work of that nature to do.
If your guys can't get it done in a normal timeframe they never will.
Especially so if your guys are already working 70 hrs/week. Adding another 20 won't help you. Go back to the drawing board, plan better, go MVP for each iteration etc...
Work/Life Balance is fundamentally a personal thing. If you make it a priority, you can take it with you anywhere you go.
When I talk to a potential employer, I make a point of telling them that I work 40 hour weeks and I take a lot of time off. I've gone so far as to negotiate away my stock options in favor of extra paid holiday and the ability to take unpaid leave. Even when working for startups that think they're in crunch mode (and have been for the last 6 months), I make Life a priority.
Where I can, I try to spread the faith. Surprisingly, I've never experienced a case where I couldn't fix things and had to leave.
Stress is infectious. But so is Sanity. I've walked into shops where 60 hour weeks were the norm and managed to infect the team with the concept of Work/Life balance. First, you introduce the idea of "the weekend", where I'm living the back of my truck next to a crag someplace (and so should you), so don't try to contact me. Then you bring in "leave at six", then eventually "40 hour weeks". All the while keeping the rest of the team on board with the idea that maybe we should have lives apart from work.
Eventually, you have a whole team working 40 hour weeks and not looking so unhealthy. Some of whom even have stories to tell when you ask what they did for the weekend. Better still, if everybody is slacking off at a sane pace, there's really nothing that management can do about it (except notice how much more work is getting done).
Congratulations, this is how it should be. I run a business and have managed to hire people who come in late, leave at the regular time and still get more than enough done. I mostly work weekends, but I'm a masochist. I don't wish it on my employees. They need to have a life.
Glad to hear this perspective, as a lot of early comments were on the other end of the spectrum. Still finding my way in startup world, but it's encouraging to hear others who have been there and managed to make it work!
I founded a startup with my brother 5 years ago - we launched in my two weeks paternity leave from work. For the first 4 years we both held down full time jobs and worked on our startup every evening. I had my 2nd child when the startup turned 4 any my brother had his first around the same time. I'm not sure if it's because we are family, but we've always had a policy (not written down or set in stone) but that if one of us wants some time off then we do.
We pretty much do normal hours (10 - 6), we still work a few evenings, but we're now both full time so haven't got the added stress of a 'day job'. It was always our dream to be able to work full time on our startup and now that's a reality there is honestly no other job i'd rather be doing. We both get to see our kids everyday, i'm due to be taking my eldest (4) swimming at lunch.
Based on my experience (every startup is different), we do live and breath it, but at the same time we always make time for family, holidays and anything else we want to do (taking the kids for days out, nursery, the gym). Our startup is actually doing better than ever and I personally feel that because we put in all the work in the first few years whilst holding down a full time job we are now in a position to be able to enjoy the fruits of our labour and have a great work/life balance.
It's not a pipedream. We run a dev team that is both productive and enthused about the work we do. Every single engineer is out the door by 6, unless there is something that needs completing urgently. We are constantly shipping new versions of our product, are very profitable and have a minute churn rate of developers.
My gut feeling is that developers who cultivate a lifestyle that will inevitably lead to them burning out are either drinking the koolaid of some kind of cliched' notion of how developers should perform, or are simply being exploited by their employers.
Everyone has a right to see their family and keep fit, and in this sellers market, developers CAN work at a sustainable pace that doesnt put their future careers at stake.
Isn't it arguably a component to "startup" culture that maximizes apparent effort (which is easy to measure) rather than actual productivity - which is very difficult to measure objectively.
Note: I have founded startups (a long time ago now) that very much went with the traditional startup culture but have also worked at small new companies that didn't have this culture at all but still did pretty well.
I think the question is entirely different for founders and employees.
For founders, the question loses some of its meaning, because the company itself is intrinsically tied to personal goals. Founders tend to not refer to the company as "a job". It's something of a different beast. This doesn't mean that some time doing non-company stuff won't ever be required to maintain sanity, but the dynamics are pretty different.
For employees, which this post seems to be about, you're ultimately working to fulfill someone else's personal goals. There it makes a lot more sense to balance working on your own personal goals and pastimes or whatever with working on the goals of the person who's signing your paychecks. The problem is that if there's a sufficient supply of employees who are willing to forgo that for whatever reason (loving the work, not having much of a life, peer pressure) then they're more likely to be favored by the employers with the implications that go along with that.
Yes, I'd imagine it'd be quite different for employees and founders. I don't know if I'm willing to make that kind of sacrifice though--maybe that means I'm not cut out to be a founder. Or maybe I haven't found the right opportunity yet.
I have been involving in a startup since one year ago. Result: I broke one relationship, and missed another. When my mom came visiting me from another state I didn't have the time to bring her around, and not even the time to talk to her. When everyone is enjoying the weekends I have to lock myself in my room and code, code CODE. When everyone is enjoying TVs after coming back from work, I read emails, filter resumes and do other work related stuffs. I don't have personal life; all of my time is consumed by this one little startup which may or may not work in the future.
Now you know why relationship won't work for me at this stage of time?
So whenever someone told me that they could have a nice work/life balance at a startup, I smiled. And when girls told me that they would support their husbands in pursuing their dreams at all cost, I could only conclude that they didn't know what they wish for.
What do you suppose would have happened, had you agreed to have dinner with your mother that night?
I assume you imagine some nightmare scenario where you find yourself living on the street begging for change and repeating to yourself over and over "Why did I take that evening off??? What was I thinking???"
In reality, it probably isn't quite that critical. I suggest you try an experiment: Work an 8 hour day tomorrow.
Don't make up for it by working 16 hours the next day. Work the rest of your week as normal, then look back and see if there is any noticeable negative ramification from that day of slacking.
Then try ramping it up. Work a 60 hour week. Work a 50 hour week, god forbid. Living in a ditch yet? Good. Try 45 hours next week.
As the people below are trying to tell you, most of this desperation is in your head. Yes, you need to work hard and deliver. But you don't need to kill yourself.
Jason's right. I cut back my weekly hours from around 55 to 45 when my daughter was born. I was surprised that my productivity didn't drop and nobody even noticed. I wish I had done that years ago.
There is a difference between "I didn't have time" and "I didn't want to spend time". It is entirely up to you and you decided to not have time for them, but for your startup. Or put another way: You decided for the part in you that wants to work on the startup instead of the part in you that wants to deal with your mother or your girlfriend.
When I read something like this, I sometimes wonder what the intention of people of running a startup is. Is it really about creating an app? The app/startup will be forgotten at some point in time anyways. So why are you doing it, if it isn't for the personal freedom that comes along with a startup (eventually) and that enables you to spend more time with the people you care about?
I mean, it is just a startup. The people might care to some degree about your product, but they don't care about you at all and you shouldn't care too much either.
I know that the "work hard" mantra is ridiculously widespread in the startup culture and especially in the US and I also know the feeling that one's mind always comes up with new ideas, whether you want it or not.
However, I prefer to work on my startup 5 to 10 hours a week, just enough to get decent money from it, be ahead of competitors and make plans or delegate the work that needs to be done.
I think the real trick in startups is not to spend as much time as possible, but as few time as possible and still get good results. At least, that is how it works for me and how it supports the general idea, why I run a startup at all: to increase my personal freedom.
The 357th time I complained to my brother about salaryman hours, he told me something that stuck with me: "You chose that. Not three years ago, either: you chose it today, because you could have quit but didn't."
You are choosing, right now, that the next thirty minutes of work on whatever is more important than calling mom. It may be. Is it always? I'm downright fascist about not wasting time on low-value activities at work and I still leak huge portions of my schedule. Are you sure that never happens? I mean, by the end of a week at 100%, I'm barely mentally capable of evaluating whether coding will be productive, to say nothing of actually coding. You've been doing that for years? How do the metrics look?
Why not? I can imagine that there's only one problem with that: You don't have enough money to support yourself so that your startup needs to be done ASAP. Then I would recommend to do some contracting work. This has two nice effects: First, it gives you money to let you support your startup in the long run. Second: It makes you more productive, because the time you have available to work on a startup is reduced. This constraint makes you focus more on the stuff that really needs to be done. Oh and third: Every idea needs time to evolve. I mean, real time. Not time you invest, but time doing something different. Just waiting-time.
I believe, if you cannot afford taking a break from your startup, your startup has a conceptual problem.
This is a pretty intense statement. I think you just may be a workaholic that has found this "must work at all costs" startup mentality as a way to rationalize said workaholism. I started working where I am today and was putting in 80-100 hour weeks for a while. I lost a girlfriend over it, and then one day I woke up and realized that if I didn't hit the arbitrary deadline some executive somewhere dreamed up, the world wouldn't end. Now I rarely put in more than 40 hours a week and I'm happily married. Let me tell you something, if it comes down to my family vs my job, my job will lose every. single. time. Random websites that let you track how many tissues your friend in Utah used when he last sneezed will be dead and gone in a few years and no one will care. When your mother goes, you will definitely wish you spent the time with her.
And yet..... You still seem to have plenty of time for HN? Which would seem to indicate you choose not to spend time with your visiting mother, just like you're choosing to spend time on HN.
IMHO, behind most, if not all, of the stories of "herculean entrepreneurs" sacrificing everything to spend 100 hours a week on their startup, you'll find the same false martyrdom. People spend 100 hours a week on their startup because it makes them feel important and makes them feel like their working their hardest. The sad reality is that's only going to be effective if your work is mindless grunt work.
I'm involved in a startup since 9 months ago. After the first 3 months wich were loaded with tons of work, long hours and a lot of stress someone told me to categorize the work on my todo-list, to think about wich tasks i could delegate to others and to filter the most important ones (a common model for this wich helped me a lot can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower_...).
Now I still have a lot to do, but i can manage to take a day off from time to time, i even went skiing for 4 days without working there.
In my opinion people lose their attitude and motivation if they dont take time to do something besides working and think about other things.
I think a lot of it comes from people reading certain luminaries - our own beloved Paul Graham comes to mind - who have good points, but not exercising critical judgement about whether said points apply to one's own situation.
What I found is that passion is one of those things that always seems excessive in retrospect and insufficient going forward. When I reflect on my periods of professional exuberance, I am always struck by how much I missed out being with my family and friends. Likewise, in the times of lull I am always guilt tripping myself about not being passionate enough, or not giving it my all.
Ultimately, the right balance depends on your own perspective on life, which in term depends on your age, personality, family situation, etc. But the older I get the more convinced I become that you can't go wrong if you err on the side of life.
I see some references to family throughout the comments, but one fundamental thing is that things are different once you have a family. The founder of our startup always goes home to have dinner w/ his wife and kids, but it would be a complete mistake to say he's slacking -- he works late into the night from home.
If your team cannot wait to leave at 6 you have a problem, but if you send your team home at 6 because they worked efficiently and achieved something, that's some work life balance then.
I believe that beyond work/life balance there is a difference between hard work and madness.
Many startups (and companies) need to go to a psychiatric hospital, they are very unorganized and the team leaders doesn't take full responsability and respect for people times.
Another thing is being really focused and concentrated on moving forward in your 40 hours week (not checking HN too much...) and doing extra hours when it's really necessary.
The most important thing for founders to remember, even if they are under the gun is that keeping employees working longer hours for a sustained duration will result in a less reliable product.
I have tried to work 80-100 hours on several occasions for a month or so and just ended up ripping up most of what I wrote. I have settled into an average of about a 65 hour workweek by picking up the laptop whenever I feel like it and stopping when I feel the pointless churn beginning. My output, as measured by Pivotal Tracker is much higher working less hours, point being my meaningful productivity is higher.
If I had an employee working that much of their own volition, I would start offer help on their process and would want to work with them on why they are approaching things in such a brute-force manner.
I would also see it as a failure on my part to set the right expectations with customers, investors, etc...
Work/Life balance is relative, but I don't think anyone can sustain a quality output at 80 hours a week for more than 3 weeks or so.
Perhaps I'm naive, but when I see companies that work like this I assume they either don't know any better or are just scared stupid. Or perhaps it is a macho startup thing.
I don't think it's either of those--I think it's a natural progression of a startup whose composition is pretty much entirely of young people straight out of school who don't have as many obligations outside of work, as say, someone with a spouse and kids (I have a spouse, but no kids). We're all trying to get on better schedules, and my post was was in no way a criticism of how things are run at Pulse.
I don't dare to make any sweeping generalizations about this, but I would love to see how age, location and amount of time spent working at startups correlates with some of the opinions here. I suspect there might be some interesting (if not entirely unsurprising) trends there.
Perhaps you're a workaholic. If so, I wouldn't be surprised that the idea of just unwinding for a while seems strange and alien. If you don't want to do it more power to you, but to those that do - they tend to think of it as an investment in their health.
Balance is a pipedream. Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration - glib, but true.
We started 5 years ago - I've been on call 24/7 ever since. We've now got other people on call too, sure, but as the technical lead, I'm where the buck stops. An average week is in the region of 70-80 hours work.
I have precious little in the way of "life" - I allow myself a few hours off once a week on Thursdays, but apart from that, spend my time glued to my laptop, growing the business.
That said, I see several ways out.
1) This sucker actually works, and we retire.
2) This sucker actually works, and we grow it into a behemoth.
3) Ditto and we sell, and I re-invest the proceeds into my next mad idea.
1 is pretty unlikely. 2&3 are far more likely, which rather reflects the fact that my work is my life, and if you're doing a startup without that attitude, it's going to suffer. A startup is effectively all about selling a "regular" 20/30's for a decade (or two) of brutally hard work, high stress, and attaining financial and inventive freedom.
We started 5 years ago... I have precious little in the way of "life"
I hate to be the one to point it out, but what you're experiencing is very far from my definition of "Success". I mean sure, according to your definition you're definitely perspiring, but isn't there supposed to be some form of payoff at some point?
All 3 of your potential forecasted outcomes lead to you not having a life any time soon. As such, it looks like you've set yourself up in a way that precludes success, as many of us define it.
For me, a successful software business is one that provides the maximum income (and thus free time) possible for the smallest effort. That's what software's so good at: turning tiny amounts of work into big benefits. As such, the ultimate goal is zero effort and infinite free time. You seem to have contrived the opposite for yourself.
We're strange, insofar as we've a foot in the software door, and a foot in the agency door - there's method to our madness, insofar as the agency side of things is effectively our peer-review group. We're highly profitable, but everything, other than bare-bones just-about-covers-the-cost-of-living stays in the business, or goes on staff salaries. Our goals and the market we're in both require vast amounts of dev work. Success, for us, is either absolute or absent - not interested in half measures. We've had two 8 digit cash offers for the business, both of which we've refused, as we don't plan on exiting until the product is fully baked.
Ultimately, I guess it depends on what you want out of it - if you're after a lifestyle business, what you describe is just fine. If you're after total global domination, it's back-breaking effort for a number of years (or a huge injection of capital up-front, although that's generally a good way to lose sight of what you're doing).
I'm not sure what your point is. If the parent doesn't follow the VC-driven "get big really goddamned fast at all costs" model, he's not successful?
There's nothing wrong with growing a business steadily for 5 years. Speaking for myself, we've been doing it for 4, and somehow I don't feel like a miserable failure.
It's funny you say "more likely" when the odds are still, to be blunt, stacked against you (I'm not trying to be a jerk, but you probably realize it's all still a longshot).
Ultimately I think your value function has to heavily and positively weight the work you're doing for 12 hours a day. If you're missing your free time I don't see how any rational person can voluntarily continue working those hours.
Ah, but I don't miss the free time, partially because I've rationally weighed up short-term costs against long-term benefits, and partially because I've come to realise that I actually enjoy working myself to the bone - hence the probability that even after this, I'll likely put myself straight back into the grinder with something new.
As to 2&3 - we've already had a few substantial (8 figure, cash) offers for the business, but we've passed them up, as they were the wrong buyers at the wrong time.
dude, and (knock on wood) u were to die today, u would reflect from above, "jeepers I never stopped one minute to look at the beauty around me or experience some magical places in this beautiful world we live" ... yeh I think its all good u doing something u really enjoy cause life is about living your passion... but its also about living in the present and who knows if u will be around to enjoy the long term benefits... so yeh my advice, try balance it a bit more, try like a few have suggested slowly reducing the hours, and spend those on ur family, exercise, etc... in my experience u will find urself feeling rejuvenated, in a good mood and that will reflect in all spheres in ur life, including ur work ;-)
I don't get this. On the one hand there's the 40h-a-week camp, backed up by plenty of research [1] and on the other hand there's the work-as-much-as-you-possibly-can camp, which seems to be what plenty of successful startup have been following. So what's the deal? Why this discrepancy?
It's not about manual vs knowledge working - studies on knowledge workers show that even less than 40h / week is beneficial. Is it about the difference in possible leverage? Self-directed work? The close link between work and payoff? The stressful situation in a startup? The 100% commitment?
Any attempts to pin down why and under what circumstances [2] different work hour guidelines should apply would be greatly appreciated.
2: What's the difference between starting your own company, running your own company, joining a startup, doing a PhD, being in a research team, working at an established startup?
It could be that successful startups succeed in spite of overtime not because of it. Also a lot of successful startups are done by (young) people who haven't had their asses handed to them because of their insane work ethics.
There indeed are stretches when one gets carried by passion and can work (almost) 24/7. One should use that wave. But when you find yourself disliking what you're doing you better stop and not write posts as in the OP.
OP is just making up excuses for feeling of guilt one feels divided between family and promise they made to themselves/somebody else. To me it seems like excuses fat people have about losing weight - or drunks about stopping drinking (when catch yourself saying - shit x is wrong and I dislike shit y in my life, but I'm still doing great - some red lights should start spinning).
To OP if you're reading this - look into mirror take a deep breath and admit that you're a workaholic. There are some "mommy" and "daddy" issues in your soul you need to resolve. You're using your work to punish yourself for something you're not even guilty of.
This is an example of a social pathology on two levels. First, it means that working for that one particular company sucks. Second, it is being deployed to make working sucks normative at other companies, too. (And if it gets widely repeated by credulous entrepreneurs, it will infect their lives, their employees lives, etc etc. The viral factor of suck in the social graph has exceeded k = 1.0, watch out!)
It has not been my experience that the narrative this social pathology tells about work being necessarily all-consuming has basis in objective reality. I've done all-consuming work. My business' schedule doesn't resemble that schedule even a little itty-bitty bit.